Gender, disability and political representation: understanding the experiences of disabled women

Women face multiple barriers during political recruitment and representational processes. Concomitantly, a burgeoning scholarship has revealed the existence of various obstacles to elected office faced by disabled people. While studies have examined intersections between gender, race class, we know little about how intersection disability gender shapes people’s experiences. This article provides an exploratory case-study analysis UK. We centre perspectives women in our analysis, drawing upon qualitative interviews undertaken with 41 candidates, politicians party activists, as well participant observation online events organised discuss office. Three themes emerged from this research: first, feel that they are perceived ‘not up job’; second, ‘othered’ processes; and, third, hyper-visibility experienced some, but not all, can be positively mainly negatively.